“Do you think you can tell me more about the Tempest?”
She shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
“So… what is it?”
“It’s really, like, a myth among Elementals.”
I nodded, fingers twitching against my cup. That would explain why Macgregor had never heard about it and said there was no cure. He would think little of a myth among Lessers.
“No matter what Supers say,” she lifted her chin, “Elemental magic is powerful.”
She said it as if she expected me to challenge her, but for me, who had been magicless most of my life, any type of magic meant power. Just because witches and warlocks could perform any type of spell didn’t make them better. From what I’d read, non-wizards could be extremely powerful precisely because their magic concentrated on a single skill—one they normally mastered to perfection because they weren’t spread as thinly as we were.
“I believe you are powerful. I’ve seen what others can do,” I said, remembering Smudge Face and the way he vibrated and broke things.
I must have sounded genuine enough because Ava Marie gave me a half smile.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the Tempest is supposed to be an ancient Elemental force. And when you release it, they say it can cleanse dark magic.”
“Dark magic?” I repeated as if in a trance.
Ava Marie set her cup aside. “Yes, like the magic that runs in vampire’s blood.”
I scrubbed at my face, feeling overwhelmed. Could this be true? Macgregor had seemed so sure there was no cure that I’d come to believe him. I’d convinced myself it had all been wishful thinking on our part, and we’d been chasing a cure because we didn’t want to accept Rowan’s fate. But what if we hadn’t been wrong? What if we’d been on the right track all along?
Ava Marie was distracted again, glancing over at the band that was now playing a different song, something flute-heavy and eerie, like an enchantment for nymphs, but with a rock vibe to it. Weird.
“So…” I let the word hang until she turned back to look at me. “Where do you find this Tempest? Does your myth talk about that?”
She shrugged. “Only in vague terms. Funny enough,” she gestured toward the band, “the Tempest was created by a pirate.”
“A pirate?” One of those with an eye patch and a parrot on their shoulder? At least that’s what came to mind.
“Yeah. He was said to be an Elemental, and that he could control the winds as if they were an extension of himself.” Her eyes went dreamy as if this was a power she wished for herself. “That’s why he became a pirate. He could go anywhere, at any time, just sail away to faraway lands where no one would bother him.”
“It sounds really great,” I said. God knew I’d wished for that sort of escape before.
“As the story goes,” Ava Marie went on, “before he died, he stored his power somewhere and declared that it could only be released once the world had changed.”
I gasped, my hand flying to my mouth. The compass’s inscription!
“What?!” she asked, looking alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“I think I know where the Tempest is.” Could it be in our very own lake? I didn’t want to get too excited, but if the compass was hidden there, it stood to reason that the lake had something to do with accessing the Tempest’s powers.
Ava Marie looked at me as if I’d lost a screw. “Are you sure this isn’t the first time you’ve had Witch’s Brew?”
“The tempest awaits behind the winds of change,” I said, the words brushing past my lips in a soft whisper.
“Hey, how do you know that?” she asked. “I never mentioned it.”
“I read it,” I said. “On a compass.”
“Wait.” She scratched her head. “What compass?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” I said, jumping to my feet and turning toward the crowd, looking for Disha. “I have to find Rowan.”
Ava Marie stood and blinked up at me. She was few inches shorter, despite her beehive hair. “Do you mean to say you have a compass that has those words on it?” she asked with a frown.
My eyes roved over the crowd, but I couldn’t spot Disha.
“Hey,” Ava Marie pulled on my arm. “Are you listening to me? Or are you ignoring me like everyone else?”
At her question, my surprise and excitement at the revelation came crashing down like a building being demolished. I turned to find an angry-looking Ava Marie. No, anger wasn’t the right emotion. She seemed more disappointed than anything else.
“I’m sorry, Ava Marie. I just got excited. We’ve had this thing with us the whole time, and we didn’t know it.”
“How can you have it?” she asked.
“Rowan found it. In this lake, actually.” I pointed toward the water.
She appeared confused for a moment, then said, “I guess that makes sense. There are a lot of powerful things hidden at this Academy. There are tons of myths about that, too. And the Tempest would have to be accessed while on a large body of water.”
I briefly wondered how many of our Academy’s myths weren’t myths at all, but I quickly reeled my thoughts back in. Now that my surprise had partly worn off, more questions flooded my mind.
“Ava Marie,” I cocked my head to one side, “does the myth mention anything about how to… release the Tempest?”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head.
Something about her expression made me wonder if she was being honest. “Are you sure?”
She began biting on her fingernail as if trying to hide behind her hand like she’d done with the cup.
I’d almost missed it, but she’d seemed to have gotten angry when she realized we had the compass. Maybe since the item had been created by an Elemental, she felt it didn’t belong in the hands of a witch or a warlock. Maybe, she thought she should have it. My shoulders tensed all of a sudden.
She sighed, seeming to sense my desperation. “It does mention how, and it’s not that difficult. The hard part is keeping the Tempest under control.” She glanced toward my cuffs, her eyebrows going up slightly as if saying “A power like yours.”
“What do you mean keep it under control?”
“Well, like I said, there’s a lot of power in there. If it goes unchecked, it could cause a lot of destruction, I guess.” She appeared uncertain.
My stomach flipped uncomfortably. We’d caused enough trouble already, and this just sounded like even more of it. Rowan had acted rashly every time he’d gotten a lead on something, but I had to handle this carefully. I couldn’t tell him about this until I figured out more.
“Do you know where I could find out more about this myth?” I asked.
Ava Marie frowned at the ground. “I… I’m not sure. I heard it from another Elemental, but I don’t know where he learned it. Maybe there is a book at the library or something.”
That was the most logical place to search. Suddenly, my hands were itching for my student ID, though the library was closed due to the convention so it wouldn’t do me any good.
“I have another question,” I said. I didn’t really want to ask it, but it would be shitty not to, especially since Ava Marie had been so nice so far.
“Shoot,” she said.
“Would it be okay for me, a witch, to use the compass?”
She trapped her lower lip between her teeth and pondered. “To be honest, I don’t know. I mean, nothing stops you from using it. Anyone with magic can release the Tempest, even if they can’t control it. When most Elementals mention it, they sound… territorial about it, I guess. Supers always act like they are better than us, but they don’t seem so picky when it comes to using items we create. So, we like to keep those things to ourselves. You guys already have all the advantage as it is.”
I had never thought about things this way and realized how disadvantaged they must feel. Hell, I would get territorial, too. I cringed, feeling as if even touching the compass was wrong of me.
Ava Marie must h
ave seen something in my expression because she hurried to add, “But I don’t think you’re like that. You wouldn’t use it against us.”
“Of course not! I just… I just want to help Rowan.”
“I understand,” she said, her eyes looking at some faraway point over the lake. “I used to have a friend who was a werewolf, and I would have done anything to help him. They aren’t only Lessers. Werewolves are considered the Lessers of the Lessers, the worst of the litter—no pun intended.” She chuckled sarcastically. “And it’s the same for vampires. They’re both made using dark magic. At least in my case, my magic comes straight from the source, and it was part of me when I was born.”
She put out her hand and wiggled her fingers. A tiny snowstorm began falling on her palm, causing a little mound of what looked like sugar to accumulate there.
“It’s not much,” she continued, “but it’s pure magic.” She shook her hand, wiped it on her tunic, and glanced up at me. “I can’t imagine what Rowan is going through. He was a warlock and now…”
“It’s killing him,” I said.
It seemed that all Rowan had ever wanted was to be a powerful warlock. He’d told me once that when his medallion chose him, he even thought he would be one of the greatest, the kind who created new spells and books would be written about. Then he’d been cursed, and his magic started dying. When everything had seemed lost, he’d gotten desperate enough to ask to become a vampire, not realizing that, eventually, this would feel like a fate worse than death.
“Charlie,” Ava Marie said, a slight smile shaping her lips. “I wouldn’t hold it against you if you use the compass. Just be careful.”
I nodded once, then faced the lake, a million ideas whirling in my mind, all tinged with the color of responsibility. I couldn’t act like Rowan, or I might end up in his shoes, regretting the outcome of my actions more than the situation that led me to them.
Slowly, my surroundings became more than just background noise. The band and the crowd came into focus once more.
The students seem to be in a frenzy, jumping and thrashing, their fists up in the air. Some of the girls had lost their tops and were twirling them over their heads, while others danced as if in ecstasy, hanging from equally dazzled guys while their bodies ground together.
“What in the world?” I said.
Ava Marie’s face twisted in disgust. “I don’t think that band is playing fair. It’s some sort of musical enhancement spell.”
“Wait.” Looking up, I pointed at the ship. A small female shape stood atop one of the yards or masts or whatever they were called. “Is that Disha?!”
“I think it is,” Ava Marie said.
Disha was standing on the narrow crossbeam, dancing, her hips swaying to the music, her arms up in the air, gyrating, a small shape against the night sky.
What the hell? How had she gotten up there? She was going to fall!
My answer came when one of the band members appeared next to her. Juan Carlos? He was singing and his voice could be heard throughout the woods, even though he wasn’t holding a microphone.
Fireworks erupted behind the sails, sprinkling the sky with blooming flowers, exploding stars, and prancing unicorns. The crowd went even wilder.
Juan Carlos twirled Disha as he held her hands aloft. Letting go, she spun around like some expert ballerina, moving along the beam, away from the singer. She looked amazing in her flowing dress, her long hair making spirals around her.
That was until she tripped and went tumbling down toward the deck.
I gasped and jumped forward, my cuffs burning hot.
Before I could get a spell out to save her, Disha’s broomstick flew up, zipping between her legs as if it all had been part of the show, which it probably was. The crowd cheered wildly as Disha eventually controlled her fall, made a long sweeping circle, and eventually, landed on the stage with style.
I sighed and shook my head. That girl had flair, but one of these days she was going to give me a heart attack.
I stayed by the edge of the crowd until the concert finished, then found a drunk and disheveled Disha and told her what I’d found out. Tomorrow, we had our work cut out for ourselves.
Disha’s favorite place awaited: the library.
Chapter Twenty-Five
SPRING SEMESTER
LATE MARCH
Disha held the blade up to my hand and waited for our eyes to meet. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, swallowing hard. The moon poured down over us as the wind blew through the trees behind us. The clearing near the woods at the edge of campus was perfect for privately summoning vampires, but it was damn creepy at night. It didn’t matter. This was the only way to reach him.
I emptied my mind as instructed and waited for her to begin.
When I felt the bite of the blade and the slow steady slice as Disha opened my palm, I squeezed my eyes shut. Pain invaded my head and I focused on it, making it the one thought blaring in my skull like an alarm. I held onto that for several minutes, hoping against hope that Rowan would feel it and that it would call him here.
Come back, Rowan. Come back.
Disha and I had poured over library books about Elemental magic and items created for them and by them. There was nothing in any book about our compass, but we read plenty about similar items and pieced together a basic understanding of how they worked.
A crucial piece of the puzzle came from a biography about an Elemental named Darius VanWent who was an expert sailor and influential leader in the early 1900s and who had searched for the compass his entire life, going as far as to guess at a possible way to release the Tempest, which fit with what Ava Marie had said about needing to be on water since this guy lived his life on the waves.
I skimmed everything I could while Disha practiced blowing papers across our library carrel.
Once we’d felt properly prepared, or as best as we could manage, we stumbled on our next problem.
Rowan was gone and we had no way to reach him.
That meant another few days pouring over information on location spells, summonings and communication charms. At one point, Disha accidentally projected her voice over the entire campus. Luckily, she was a quick thinker and turned it into a joke, asking anyone listening to help her find a lost Jimmy Choo shoe. The Dean sent us a note stating she was not amused, but at least it didn’t garner any suspicion.
The answer for how to contact Rowan came a day later from a source we’d never even considered. Batty Bridget.
Yesterday, she’d plopped down beside us at lunch, rubbing her side and groaning.
“Pulled a muscle in your sleep?” Disha had asked with a side-eye. Apparently, Bridget was still doing spells and levitating herself during slumber. Lately, she’d been hovering near Disha’s bed shouting something about caterpillars.
“No, it’s my brother. They’re trying a new incantation on his wound today. Judging from the pain, it’s not going well.”
“You can feel his pain? Why?” I asked.
“The bonding spell does that,” she said, spooning pudding in her mouth. “It’s dull when he’s farther away, otherwise I’d have to be sedated like he is.”
“You can feel him even when he’s in another state?” My skin began to prickle as the realization of what this might mean swept over me.
“Yea, I would think it would grow fainter and might even disappear the further away he is, but we’ve never been that far apart from each other. It wasn’t like that in the very beginning, but now… ” She sighed.
I thought about her last few words for a moment. Rowan had been injured a few times since we made the blood pact, but I’d never felt his pain. But what if, by now, that had changed?
I kicked Disha under the table and gave her a look. She glanced at me in concern, but I ignored her worried look and let my brain whirl. I needed to feel pain and hope that Rowan could feel it, too.
My only worry was… what if he felt it and didn’t come?
Yet, despit
e that fear, here we were, a day later, near the dark forest, well past midnight, jamming a dagger into my hand.
“Is it bad?” Disha asked, looking pale as blood spilled down my hand and dripped into the grass.
I gritted my teeth. “Yeah, but I’m not sure it’s bad enough. Push harder.”
“Charlie, I’m not some sadomasochist. I hate the sight of blood. Gah, this is gross. It got on me! Ugh.” She made a strange choking noise in her throat.
“Woman up, Disha,” I said, breathing through the pain. “I’m the one with a hole in my hand.”
She swallowed and jabbed the knife harder.
Pain like a blazing sun shot into my hand and traveled up my body. Blood coated my skin and painted the lawn below me. My stomach roiled and my limbs wobbled. Now I was the one who felt like I might throw up.
“That’s enough,” Disha said, pulling away the knife and beginning a healing spell.
“Heal the hand, but leave the pain,” I said through gritted teeth. “Make sure you clean up all the blood. Rowan might be thirsty when he arrives.”
She shook her head. “Good God, girl, the things you do for love. Juan Carlos asked me if I could meet his mother and I broke up with him on the spot. And here you are, willing to cut off an arm.”
I didn’t answer. Closing my eyes, I pushed the pain outward, trying to focus it like a homing beacon.
“Now what?” Disha asked, sitting and then sagging into the grass, careful to avoid my blood splatter as she wove a cleaning spell over it.
“Now we wait,” I said, following her lead.
I let my head nestle into the grass as I stared up at the stars. Would Rowan come? I hadn’t heard from him in months. If he cared, if he’d really thought about me, he would’ve contacted me at least once, right? Was I being a good friend and continuing to help someone as best I could? Or was I a pathetic girl killing herself for a boy?
I honestly didn’t know anymore.
We must’ve fallen asleep because the next thing I knew the sky was graying with dawn and there was a man standing over me.
I lurched up, charging the cuffs only to find Rowan staring down.
Supernatural Academy: Sophomore Witch Page 18
