by Chloe Garner
She hoped she wasn’t in the middle of a war.
“Why won’t you take me?” Valerie asked.
“I can’t go back, darling,” he said. It was the first time she could think of that he’d used a term of familiarity like that. He was still radiating enthusiasm from the fight. “Lady Harrington will have fixed the holes I used to get in, the first time. Gemma can, because her magic is so much quieter than mine, but once she lets you out of the truck, you’re going to have to move fast. Things are going to be collapsing behind you. Best if you run, actually.”
“Wait,” Valerie said more emphatically. “When will I see you again?”
He paused.
“Wasn’t sure if you would,” he said.
“You’re my dad,” she said. “I’ve thought you were dead my entire life. I want to see you again.”
He shook his head.
“Then come fight,” he said quietly. “Only way I come back is if the war is well and truly over.”
He held up a hand as Gemma laid on the horn.
“I’m not going there after dark,” the woman yelled out the window. “Not even for Grant Blake.”
Valerie looked over her shoulder at the truck, then turned back to say something else to her dad - she didn’t even know what - but he was already underground again.
She sighed and went to get in the truck.
Gemma was quiet for a long time.
A very long time.
Long enough that Valerie had long begun to wonder if the radio was broken, because that much silence had to be uncomfortable for anyone.
“It will be… strange… when you get back,” the woman finally said to her.
“Okay,” Valerie said. “Lots of new secrets to keep, training with my dad to disguise…”
“Oh,” Gemma laughed. “That’s normal. The strange part will be that you never left.”
Valerie started to respond to that, then closed her mouth again and frowned.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Clearly I did.”
She’d totally forgotten to try to get in touch with Sasha to let her know that she was okay.
Felt bad about that.
“No,” Gemma said. “You’ll even remember what you did while you were there. You never left. Whatever story your father invented for everyone to believe, you’ve been walking around there at the school from the night he took you. No one will ever know that you were gone unless they intentionally go looking for magic.”
Valerie felt her mouth fall open.
“That’s not possible,” she said.
“Technically, you’re right,” Gemma said.
Valerie waited.
And waited a bit more.
“But…” Valerie prompted. Gemma snorted.
“Don’t try to get me to explain it to you,” she said. “I’m just a human lie detector. I haven’t got useful or interesting magic, when it comes to being out here in the field.”
“I’m going to remember?” Valerie asked.
“You are,” Valerie said. “And you’ll have to deal with having dual memories for the rest of your life. At some point, you’ll probably lose some time, minutes here and a few hours there, as your brain tries to work it out. It’s a very delicate instrument, your brain. Doesn’t like knowing two things were true when it’s only possible for one of them to have been true.”
Valerie frowned at this, pressing her shoulder against the car door.
“Has it happened to you?” she asked.
“Only reason I’m alive,” Gemma said after a moment. “Several times over.”
“Does it hurt?” Valerie asked.
“Not for me,” Gemma said. “Can’t say, for you.”
“But I wasn’t there,” Valerie said. Gemma shrugged.
“Gotta deal with it for yourself,” she said, then went silent again.
She didn’t speak again the entire rest of the trip.
“You have to tell me where the driveway is,” Gemma said as the sun began to set off to Valerie’s right.
“I don’t know,” Valerie answered.
“I know it’s on this road,” Gemma said. “But I can’t see it, and you can.”
Valerie sat forward, pointing.
“That one? Maybe?”
“More specific,” Gemma said, slowing.
“You can’t see it?” Valerie asked.
“I know within a mile where it is,” Gemma told her. “I’m going to drive off the road on your say-so.”
“Okay,” Valerie said. “Um. Slower?”
“Gotta be specific,” Gemma said. “If you get me stuck, everyone is going to die.”
Valerie glanced at her.
“You say that a lot,” she said, and Gemma shrugged.
“It’s true more of the time than people want to hear.”
“Why didn’t Dad bring me?” Valerie asked. “Slower. It’s right… right there, that… by the tree.”
“Lots of trees,” Gemma said, the truck at a crawl. “He had to clean up the caves. Undoubtedly they tried to use magic against him and fried themselves. Bodies and cave-ins to fix.”
“There,” Valerie said. “The… bendy tree… Yes, there from… no, on the other side of the bendy tree.”
“Not helping,” Gemma said.
“Doing my best,” Valerie said, all the way up against the dash board now. “Okay, turn a little harder and… Stop. No. Stop. Back up. You went too far.”
Gemma put the truck in reverse and Valerie marveled at the tree-lined sand driveway that Gemma couldn’t see.
“It’s just right there,” she said.
“You aren’t making this any easier,” Gemma said.
Valerie pointed.
“Just… that way.”
This time, Gemma managed to get the truck onto the driveway, and Valerie had a fleeting moment of doubt that perhaps she shouldn’t have helped the woman find it.
She was giving The Pure a direct path to the school, through this woman.
What if she was a double-agent?
What if she really did hate Valerie and all of the rest of the people on this side of the war and was willing to see them all die in order to end it?
What if Valerie’s dad didn’t understand at all?
It was done.
A moment later, Gemma nodded.
“I can see it now. We’re past the warding.”
Valerie sat back in her seat, watching the school come into view around a bend, there on top of a hill.
It was a beautiful building.
“Was everyone okay, after the attack?” Valerie asked.
“How would I know?” Gemma answered. “You’ll know for yourself, soon enough.”
She rolled the truck to a stop and looked over at her.
“Once your feet hit the ground, keep moving. The magic is going to clean up all of the evidence that you ever weren’t there. That’s your prime timeline, after this. Don’t let it erase you.”
“Erase me?” Valerie asked. Gemma nodded.
“Totally possible. Apparently it happened to me once. Don’t remember a thing. And… I know I seem callous, but you being alive is better than you being dead, all things being equal.”
Valerie frowned at her.
“You’re the weirdest grown-up I’ve ever met,” Valerie said, and Gemma laughed.
“You don’t get out much,” she answered. “Go. I can’t stay here any longer.”
Valerie got out of the truck, pushing the door closed behind her, and immediately there was a sense of pressure between her shoulders, like she was being crushed between a pair of hard foam rollers.
She ran.
Her back was pressed against the door, the demon thumping at it with a pressure that threatened to overwhelm her, but she held.
She held.
There was shouting in the hallway, and hissing, voices she didn’t recognize, couldn’t even place what language they were speaking, and then sounds of enormous violence.
Valerie looked at th
e girls in the room and drew a slow, deep breath.
“I think it’s over,” she said.
Several of them were sitting on Valerie’s bed crying, but Sasha just let her arms drop and nodded.
“You did it,” she said. “You held them out.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Valerie?” Mr. Jamison asked. “Is everyone in there okay?”
“I think so,” Valerie called back. “Is everything… done?”
“They’re gone,” he said.
Valerie looked at Sasha for guidance, and the girl shrugged, twisting her mouth.
“I don’t know if they can fake a voice,” she said.
“Can you prove it?” Valerie asked.
“I was there in Mr. Tannis’ room the first day of school when you demonstrated that you aren’t like any other student in school,” he said.
The girls looked at Valerie, and Valerie nodded, opening the door.
There was dust, dark gray and drifting, all down the hallway of the dorm wing.
“I need you to all stay in there,” Mr. Jamison said. “I just need to see who’s there and check to make sure that you’re all okay.”
“What happened?” Valerie asked, sticking her head out into the hallway.
“Mrs. Gold held them off and the rest of us came and finished them,” Mr. Jamison said.
“Is everyone okay?” Valerie asked, a lifting sense of hope in her chest. He pressed his lips, looking past her into the room.
“We need to make sure we know where everyone is,” he said. “Lady Harrington will make any announcements that need to happen.”
Something about his face.
Something was wrong.
Something was really, really wrong.
Yasmine was dead.
Valerie pressed her back against the door, just the way she had that night, her heart racing.
The demons had managed to kill her before she’d gotten away, along with two other girls, sophomores whose names Valerie hadn’t known.
“What are you doing?” Sasha asked from her bed.
What had she just been doing?
She’d been running down the hallway at a full sprint, but…
Everything.
She could remember all of it.
She’d written to Hansen; he was coming next weekend to visit.
She’d practiced and memorized and they’d cleaned up from the attack, and she’d told everyone how she’d held the door over and over again, without even knowing. She remembered the parents coming, the loud arguments just behind a door, people crying.
She had feelings for Ethan Trent.
Not just flirty, what’s-going-to-happen feelings.
Real, where-is-he-now feelings, and he smiled when he saw her in the hallways.
He thought she’d been dead, and it had changed things.
And she remembered all of it.
It just…
It wasn’t real.
Was it?
Which thing had actually happened?
School was crazy, sure, but her dead father coming and teaching her magic?
Surely that was just a wish-fulfillment dream of some kind.
One that had felt awfully real, okay, but she’d been at school the whole time.
She knew she had.
“Sorry,” Valerie said. “I think I forgot my shampoo. Going to take a shower.”
“Forgot your towel, too,” Sasha said, laying back on her pillow again to continue reading.
“Right,” Valerie said. “Sorry. Mind was somewhere else.”
“Mind was off being moon-eyed over Elvis Trent’s little brother,” Sasha said, then looked at Valerie like she hadn’t intended to say anything out loud.
Valerie laughed.
“Oh, so that’s how it is, is it?” she asked, and Sasha ducked her head behind her book again.
“You’re cute,” the redhead said. “It’s just… I don’t know. He’s a Trent.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Valerie said.
Valerie got her towel off the back of the closet door and went to get her shower caddy from under her desk - what had she been thinking, heading out without anything…
She still had sneakers on.
She pushed them off with her toes, stripping her socks and tossing them in the hamper in the closet, then got her flip-flops and picked everything up again, walking down the hallway to the bathroom.
She passed the spot - which Mr. Jamison and Mr. Tannis were still attempting to block the magic from the mark on the wall - and she frowned at it.
Spoke words in Aramaic and Greek scolding it for being there, then put her hand up at the spot where she’d first touched it to kill the silverthorn.
It hissed and sputtered and bubbled, but retreated down toward the floor until it was just a black pop-mark.
She frowned harder at it, but she couldn’t make that go away. Not without more stuff.
More stuff.
She wondered what Sasha had stashed away in the room that she might be able to use on it, continuing on to the shower.
It was Tuesday.
Hansen would be there on Friday, straight out of school.
He said that his mom wasn’t coming - huge shock for Valerie, given that she didn’t think Hansen had ever traveled without her, even for sports stuff - but that she sent her love and was glad to hear that Valerie was okay.
The letter was sitting on Valerie’s desk.
She turned on the shower, feeling very strange, and on an impulse she ran back to her room, picking up the letter from Hansen and taking it back to the bathroom with her.
She hadn’t read it enough times to memorize it, but she had read it enough times to know everything that was in it.
Hansen had such under-developed, cramped handwriting. He was a smart guy. Did better in his classes than most anyone, but his handwriting looked like he’d failed second grade.
He was coming this weekend; he’d meet the bus downtown after school and bring his overnight bag. Couldn’t wait to see her and hear what had actually happened that day.
That day.
Valerie shuddered at the thought of it, going through the cover story from Lady Harrington once more.
The opportunity had come up at the last minute, to go to the Prestigious Global Learning Academy - she wasn’t sure if Prestigious was part of the name or not, but she always capitalized it, now - as part of a sponsorship through a job that Susan had taken. It had all been now-or-never, and they’d agreed to jump at it, but Susan had been very busy with work, and didn’t have an international cell phone worked out yet for the section of Africa where she was, and GLA had a strict no-phones policy for all students.
It impeded learning focus.
Hanson was going to have questions.
Questions that the cover story hadn’t addressed.
And Valerie was going to have to lie to her best friend.
Oh, how she didn’t want to do that.
She loved Hanson too much to lie to him.
But.
Magic.
She’d just experienced what being involved with magic could do to you, and she had no intention of putting that on him.
Maybe better if she hadn’t invited him at all, but Ethan had encouraged her, said that having a friend from back home come would help her get past what had happened with the demons.
The bodies in the hallway.
She’d seen one of them, just a glimpse that Mr. Jamison hadn’t successfully blocked, and… she was having such a hard time figuring out what she was supposed to feel about it. It was all a muddled mess in her chest and her stomach…
She just wanted to see Hanson.
To hear about how things were at school and in the neighborhood and with basketball…
That was her strategy. If he got to asking questions that were too hard, she was going to ask him about basketball. He could talk about that for hours.
Yasmine was dead.
Violently.
She’d stayed in her room for two full days, and she really wasn’t speaking to anyone, even now.
It was…
That wasn’t supposed to happen.
It wasn’t supposed to be real.
Valerie washed her hair and wrapped herself in a towel, carrying her clothes back to the room and getting dressed in her pajamas.
It was a little early, but there was no point getting back into her regular clothes.
Which desperately needed to be washed. She added them to the laundry bin.
And shook her head.
She’d worn them for multiple days.
But there was Hanson’s letter in her hands, same as every other time she read it.
Her father was alive.
She knew he was.
She spoke languages she’d never heard before because he’d taught her.
She couldn’t just forget what he’d taught her.
It didn’t matter how badly she wanted it to not be real.
Except she did want it to be real. He was alive.
“Do you know where the teachers hang out after class?” Valerie asked Sasha.
“There’s a teacher’s living space up on the second floor by the library,” Sasha answered. “They all live in cottages, but if they’re still in the building, that’s where they’ll be. Unless they’re working in their classrooms still. Why?”
Valerie shook her head.
“I think I’m going to go talk to Mr. Jamison,” she said.
“All right,” Sasha said. “How much homework do you have left tonight? You want to play a game?”
“I… Yeah, I think I have time. Let me go talk to him, and then I’ll see.”
Sasha smiled at her and rolled onto her stomach, getting out a pencil and reaching up onto her desk to write something down. Valerie got her flip-flops back on and put on a long sweater - it wasn’t quite cold out yet, but the school felt open and empty during the hours that most of the students were in their dorm rooms, and the sweater made her feel safer and more comfortable.
She walked slowly down the hallways, finding a set of stairs that would take her up on the right side of the building, thinking very carefully about whether or not she should talk to Mr. Jamison at all.
Maybe Mrs. Reynolds, instead.
But her mother had trusted Mr. Jamison.
What about Lady Harrington?
Her father had been intentionally avoiding the woman.
