“Yeah, fire,” Disha said dreamily, leaving the bed and walking toward me.
We stood side by side, peering down at the compass as it sat on the desk, oblivious to our plotting.
“I don’t know, Disha. I kinda like my room. Look, I just got a lava lamp.” I pointed at my trash day find on my nightstand.
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Fire is cleansing. An expertly-handled magical fire would burn away the rust, then forge the words back into shape.”
“What about a sophomorically-handled magical fire?” I asked with a sardonic raise of one eyebrow.
Disha considered for a moment. “Charbroiling results, most likely.”
The puns might be the death of us before the fire even started.
What other choice did we have? It was already useless to Rowan. We had to try something.
“Be my guest,” I said, taking a step back and gesturing toward the compass with an extended hand.
Disha placed her hand daintily on her chest, did a little curtsey, and mouthed “Moi?” with mock disbelief.
“Yeah, you, Ms. Khatri. Don’t be modest.”
She swatted in my direction in a dismissive gesture, batting her eyes and waving to an imaginary crowd. I shook my head and smiled at her flair for dramatization.
In an instant, a serious expression replaced her silly one. She cracked her fingers and, closing her eyes, took a few deep breaths. When her eyelids fluttered open, blue fire burst from her fingertips, the flames small and carefully contained like she was a human Zippo lighter.
Slowly, she lowered her hands toward the compass. When she was only a couple of inches away from touching it, she stopped. The short flames at her fingertips started to grow, tentatively lapping like tongues at the surface of the compass.
Almost right away, the lid glowed white-hot. I feared for my desk, or more precisely, what my R.A. might say if any of the contents of my room turned into giant lumps of charcoal.
I watched Disha with my heart in my mouth, afraid the intense heat would melt the compass, no matter how carefully she went about the spell.
I don’t know what I expected, maybe an instant puddle of metal, but it certainly wasn’t the ten minutes of non-stop flames that my friend was able to dish out.
When sweat began pouring down the side of her face, I started to worry. Was she alright? Had she gotten stuck or something? What if the compass was sucking her energy? What if it had her in a trance? This was taking way too long.
Five more minutes passed, and my worry turned to full-fledged freak-out. I was about to grab her and shake her when the flames extinguished, her arms collapsed to her sides, and she staggered backward. I caught her and clumsily dragged her to the bed.
“Are you alright?” I asked, pushing sweaty strands of hair away from her face.
Her eyes were closed and her skin feverish.
“Oh, my god.” I glanced toward the door. “Disha, I’ll go get someone.”
I turned to go, but she gripped my arm.
“I’m fine, Charlie,” she said, without opening her eyes. “Did it work?”
“Shit! That doesn’t matter. Are you really okay?”
She opened her eyes and smiled. “Nothing a five-hour nap and three blueberry muffins can’t fix.”
I gave her a skeptical, sideways glance.
“I promise,” she said. “Now, go see if it worked.” She nudged my arm.
Reluctantly, I stood and walked back to the desk. I started to lean forward, my hands behind my back, when Disha said, “It won’t be hot. C’mon, bring it here.”
I touched the compass with one finger, then quickly pulled away. Indeed, it wasn’t hot, just slightly warm. I picked it up. A charred, irregular shape was left behind on my desk. It was black as hell and formed a small crater.
My room deposit would be totally gone if I actually paid to be here, I mused as I walked back to the bed and sat next to Disha. She pushed up on her elbows, looking as if she was about to pass out.
I held the compass in the palm of my hand as we both leaned forward. It looked exactly the same, but I held onto hope.
“Can you see anything?” Disha asked.
Staring hard as if it were an optical illusion painting, I tilted the compass this way and that. Finally, letters swam into view.
“Nice try,” it said.
Then, just like that, the words were gone.
Disha blew up her bangs in defeat. “It couldn’t be that easy, could it?”
“No,” I said, defeated. “Nothing ever is.”
Chapter Nine
FALL SEMESTER
LATE SEPTEMBER
A few weeks of classes passed in a blur of spells and potions, finger positions and centered chi. After the crazy start of Freshman Year, Sophomore Year seemed positively mundane by comparison. Still, there was a lot to learn and, even with my all-powerful cuffs, I was struggling.
One class, in particular, made me want to pull out all my eyebrow hairs and move back to the beet farm. The class was Enchanting Objects 203 and it was lead by Professor Hitchcock-Watson, a man you might call old. Ancient. Prehistoric. Some students joked he’d crawled out of the primordial soup.
I wasn’t sure how old the professor was, but, unlike his young, hot co-workers, this was a man Disha had no interest in dating. For one thing, he wore a very strange hairstyle that resembled the powdered wigs George Washington and his cronies wore. The grayish-white hair grew big and wild out of his head, often looking like a wig, though I was sure no one in their right mind would pay money to have fake hair that made them look as if they had churros stuck to their temples.
Besides his hair, the rest of his attire and appearance were unremarkable, moth-eaten cardigan sweaters worn over threadbare collared shirts he’d probably purchased when Nixon was president. Yet, it was his attitude that set him apart from the rest.
He acted as if magic were boring, the most mundane subject in the world. I couldn’t fathom anyone getting tired of magic, but then there was Professor Hitchcock-Watson. He’d done the impossible.
Take today’s lesson for example. We were supposed to be enchanting a teapot. Each student was given a thrift store kettle that had seen better days. Our task was to read through our giant textbook and find the spell that would get the teapot to heat itself without flame. Although it was a practical spell, I could think of about one million other things I’d like to do with the ability to enchant objects.
Flying cars, anyone?
But instead, all his tortures—his lessons, I mean—were domestic in nature. Last week, for instance, we’d taught us to enchant towels so they would dry themselves, and the week before, we’d learned to turn a TV on and off with the flick of an eyebrow.
Hadn’t he heard of a remote control or a clothes dryer?
He’d find the most boring spell in the textbook and make us pour laboriously over it, grousing and correcting us as if nothing we were doing was correct and our very presence gave him hemorrhoids or something. Classes felt like a punishment, like detention for something we’d done wrong. I couldn’t wait for the semester to be over.
Rowan had been smart and taken another class. I wondered briefly why he hadn’t warned me. Luckily, Disha, Bridget, and Ava Marie were there to suffer with me.
The Enchantments Room was small and stuffy, its walls lined with shelves stuffed with leather bound books. Twenty-five rectangular tables sat in two rows, all facing the podium and teacher’s desk at the front. There were no posters or memorabilia on the professor's desk like there were in other teachers’ classrooms. The only thing that seemed to mark this as Professor Hitchcock-Watson’s space was the giant plant on his desk. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, huge with a pinkish green flowering head that made me think of the plant from that old movie called The Little Shop of Horrors.
I wondered if he fed it blood when we left.
Sighing, I focused my attention away from the human-eating plant and back to the task at hand. My teapot was
no closer to boiling than before class had started. I’d read the chapter, its content as dry as the Sahara, but hadn’t yet attempted the spell. It seemed pointless. Couldn’t I just get one with an electrical plug from Target?
Behind me, Bridget and Ava Marie seemed equally frustrated. Ava Marie stared contemptuously at her kettle while Bridget swore at her textbook under her breath. Only Disha was attempting the spell with any accuracy. We shared a table so I had a front row seat as she interlocked her ring fingers and then flipped them over, muttering the incantation.
Soon, her tarnished copper kettle was blowing steam from its spout and whistling Dixie. Disha smiled until the smell of burning wood flooded the room and brought our professor shuffling over to our table. No one had thought about what a burning kettle would do to the pitted pine tabletops.
“Well done, Ms. Khatri,” he croaked, “but let’s not burn the place down, eh?” He nodded at her as if she was supposed to suppress the spell even though we hadn’t gotten any instruction on how to stop the process.
Disha, always wanting to please, bit her lip and weaved her fingers backward. Instead of cooling down, the kettle burned hotter, hissing loudly and blackening the tabletop. The wood began to smoke where the pot touched the surface, indicating it was seconds from becoming a roaring fire.
“No, no,” the professor shouted. “What are you doing? Watch out.”
He pushed us out of the way with one hand while wildly gesturing with the other. Ice shot out of his arthritic fingers, hitting the kettle’s steaming sides and putting out the smoldering wood beneath. The kettle hissed like an angry animal before settling down.
Professor Hitchcock-Watson blew his cotton-fluff hair out of his eyes and glared at Disha. “If you don’t know how to reverse a spell, why in the world would you attempt it?”
Disha gaped. She’d been the first student to actually attempt the spell he’d assigned and now she was getting punished for it? I couldn’t let that stand.
“She attempted it because you told her to,” I said, steaming as much as the kettle.
The professor’s rheumy eyes turned on me. “I don’t need sass from a girl who can’t even perform a simple heating spell. Don’t think you’re special, Charlie Rivera. I know the only power you have comes from those cuffs.”
I glared at him, my chest heaving. How dare he?!
He shook his head and whirled around, not even giving me the satisfaction of seeing how angry I was. “Class dismissed,” he said tiredly.
Shuffling back to his desk, he grabbed his bag and exited through the back door without another word.
As the rest of the students filtered out, I stood there, fuming and wondering what crawled up his one-hundred-year-old sphincter. How could he have been so mean to me? To Disha?
Bridget came up and patted me on the back. “Don’t sweat it. I hear he’s that way to everyone who supports non-wizards. He almost wouldn’t let Ava Marie in this class.”
“So, he’s racist?” I asked, not sure if that made me feel better in the slightest.
Bridget considered this, cocking her head, red hair falling to one side. “Not really racist, being-ist I think, but yeah. An ass. Why do you think there are so few non-wizards in this class? Ava Marie is the only one as far as I know and he’s awful to her most of the time.”
The quiet girl nodded her wispy blond head. She was dressed in all-black, blending into her surroundings. But, at Bridget’s words, she actually spoke. “I’m nearly failing the class even though I do every assignment.”
“That’s awful,” Disha said.
Now that Bridget mentioned it, I noticed there weren’t any other non-wizards in our class. Rowan had chosen Magical Creatures instead but hadn’t told me why. I assumed it was because he liked studying kelpies and wisps, but now I knew it was because a stuffy old man didn’t like his kind.
My anger bloomed bright again. “Ava Marie, you should go to the dean. Something needs to be done.”
Ava Marie shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll work itself out.”
I was about to protest when Ava Marie pointed behind us. “Look at the kettle.”
As we turned, Ava Marie walked up to Disha’s copper kettle. It had once been tarnished, but the fire and ice seemed to have cleansed the grime and muck away. Words I’d not noticed before stretched along the side. “Made in India.”
Ava Marie rubbed her thumb over them. “Neat.”
Staring at the kettle and the revealed words, a thought popped into my head. My eyes shot to Disha who seemed to be having the same idea I was. Fire and ice had uncovered the words on the kettle. Could they do the same for the compass?
We had a break between classes so Disha and I said quick goodbyes to Bridget and Ava Marie. Running back to my room, we pulled the compass out of the box under my bed where I’d stashed it.
“You can replicate your fire spell?” I asked Disha.
She nodded. “Do you have an ice spell you can use?”
“How about the freezing spell we learned when Hitchcock-Watson made us do cubes for our ice tea?” I made a face. God, he was awful. I’d emphasized that word for a reason.
“That should work,” Disha said, then flexed her fingers, and pulled her long black hair behind her shoulders. “Set the compass on the charred spot.” She pointed to my desk where we’d already attempted the spell. “At least then, it can’t get any worse.”
I did as she said, not sure if we could prevent further damage. We might end up burning my room down, but it was worth it if we could finally decipher the clue.
Disha began her human lighter trick again, the blue flames licking from her fingertips. I let her heat up the compass for a minute while I prepped the ice spell in my head. Once the compass was glowing hot, I blasted it with ice.
Steam filled the air as it had with Disha’s kettle. The hot and cold collided, canceling each other out with a prophetic hiss. Soon, we both turned off our spells and stared at the compass. I wanted to look closer but was too afraid we’d failed again.
Disha picked it up with tentative hands and peered at the now sparkling surface. All the rust and tarnish were gone, just like with her kettle. The intricate shape of a compass rose showed in the middle of the lid, surrounded by tiny letters.
Giddiness flapped like a million butterflies inside my stomach.
“That’s amazing, Disha.” I glanced at her. “Can you see it now?”
She shook her head. “I sensed the letters during the spell.” She wrinkled her nose. “I can almost remember them, but…” Her hand fluttered in the air, then reached out as if the words were getting away. “What does it say?” She handed me the compass.
I brought the compass nearer and read it to myself. “Hmm, I don’t know what the heck it means.”
“C’mon, don’t leave me in suspense, Chardonnay.”
“‘The tempest awaits behind the winds of change,’” I read out loud. “Ring any bells?”
Disha’s eyebrows went up. “As a matter of fact, it does.”
Chapter Ten
FALL SEMESTER
LATE OCTOBER
“Good goddamn, the water’s cold!” Disha cried, stepping into the Enlightenment Fountain. Its surface rippled against her brown thighs. “You’d think it’d be warmer since it’s been in the seventies every day. Do they ice this thing? Geez!”
I watched Disha tiptoe into the water as a feeling of unease unspooled in my gut. This would be the first time we’d tried accessing the portal since the night Rowan had been turned into a vampire. And the first time we were attempting the plan we’d put in place over a month ago after we’d learned about the inscription. A lot was at stake.
It had also been a month since we’d uncovered the compass clue and surmised that we needed to follow it further down the rabbit hole. The problem was we exhausted every book in the Academy’s library, then asked anyone we could think of, but no one had heard of the compass clue besides Disha. She’d heard it from her father, but, at first, we’d de
cided asking him wasn’t the best idea. He was still pissed about our escapades last year.
We’d even Googled it, but “The tempest awaits behind the winds of change,” only came up with many versions of Shakespeare’s play and nothing else substantial. That was the point when we’d decided to finally call Mr. Khatri.
Listening to Disha talk to her baba had been endearing. Her voice took on a hint of an accent and the tone rose until she sounded ten years younger. She told her father she was doing a project on things our parents taught us when we were kids and then read him the inscription.
Her dad relayed that he’d heard the phrase during his time at school but didn’t remember the exact source. He did tell her where to look, though, his old stomping grounds.
The only problem? Disha’s dad had studied magic in Turkey!
Definitely excited about the prospect of visiting her father’s alma mater, Disha explained he had attended Doğaüstü Akademi. She said it was an excellent Supernatural school with a beautiful campus, which boasted the world’s largest magical library. Something called Kütüphane Ciftliği.
Bingo.
Also, thank goodness we didn’t have to learn Turkish. Disha knew a translation spell. And Rowan knew location spells.
That left me the task of transporting us there because, where there was an Academy, there had to be a portal.
Now, as Rowan watched, Disha walked further into our portal fountain, moaning loudly about the water’s temperature.
He crossed his arms, looking unamused with her antics. “We’re supposed to be doing this surreptitiously, remember, Dish? We’re not exactly supposed to be using this mode of transportation, so zip it.” He ran a finger and thumb along his lips in a zipper motion.
She flashed him an annoyed look. “Everyone is at the game. No one can hear me.”
In all our great scheming, we’d been smart enough to plan this excursion for a time when everyone would be preoccupied during the yearly homecoming game.
Supernatural Academy: Sophomore Witch Page 7
