by Chloe Garner
Valerie ran into her mother’s arms and hugged her hard.
“I thought…” she whispered, and her mother nodded.
“I know you did,” she said. “Healing warding makes us exceedingly hard to kill unless you really know your stuff. Are you okay?”
Susan held Valerie out at arms’ length and looked her up and down.
“I’m fine,” Valerie said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m harder to kill than you can imagine,” Susan said, looking around the room. “Henry is going to be impossible, after this. All right. One of my secrets to survival is to never stay in the same place for too long. And I’ve been here way too long. I need to go.”
“What about me?” Valerie asked. “I have to come with you.”
Susan gave her another hug, then held her by her elbows.
“You have to stay. You are safe here, as safe as anyone can make you, and you’re learning how to take care of yourself. Look at what you just did. That jamming vapor was… one of the best I’ve ever seen. I know it’s hard, but it will get easier as you figure it out.”
“But they just tried to kill us,” Valerie said.
“They’re going to keep trying,” Susan answered. “But you better believe if they leave themselves open like that, sending this kind of people out here to get you, I’m going to take advantage. That’s why I have to go right now. People are out of position, and that’s when I get my opportunities. I mean it about Hanson, though. Be careful.”
“I think he’s dating my roommate, as of tonight,” Valerie answered. “You be careful of Hanson.”
Susan stretched her mouth to the side, then shook her head.
“I can’t convince you,” she said. “All I can do is warn you. Why isn’t his mom here? Think hard about that.”
“I told you,” Valerie started, but Susan shook her head.
There were voices out in the hallway again.
“I have to go now,” her mother whispered. “I hate to leave you with the cleanup, but clearly no one will blame you for this.”
Valerie gave her mother a dark look, and Susan smiled brightly.
“So proud of you,” she whispered, then kissed Valerie’s forehead and went out the door.
There was perhaps a fifteen second gap, and then Lady Harrington’s voice.
“Who’s in there?” she called.
“It’s me,” Valerie called back. “Valerie Blake. And it isn’t my fault.”
Aftermath
Back in the big conference room.
And every teacher in the school was pressed in there, with Valerie sitting at the table and Lady Harrington sitting at the other end.
“I will remind the faculty that I plan on dismissing all of you before we get to the sensitive portion of this interview, but that I know all of you have questions and it wouldn’t be right to hold the entire interview in private.”
Valerie wasn’t sure she wanted to answer any questions, just now, not to mention all of them, but she sat still, doing her best not to fidget.
She wanted to go to bed and lay and think on what her mother had said and everything else that had happened that night.
But, no.
The teachers had questions.
“What happened?” Mr. Jamison started. Valerie shook her head.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” she answered.
“We’ll save that for the private interview,” Lady Harrington said. “I’m opening the floor to questions about the magic exchange and nothing else.”
“How many casts happened in my room?” Mr. Tannis asked.
“Um,” Valerie said. “A few? I… I don’t know what counts as in and what was in the hallway. Where it started or where it finished?”
“Mr. Tannis, you can probe at the specifics on your own time, if you don’t mind,” Lady Harrington said.
“Are you okay?” Mrs. Reynolds asked. Valerie nodded.
“They tried to hit me, but the warding in the room protected me, and I cast something that healed it and blocked it.”
“What was that?” someone else asked. Valerie tried to remember the words that she’d used, but they fumbled on her lips, no longer mechanical and easy.
“That worked?” another teacher asked.
“You’ve never worked with a natural before,” Lady Harrington murmured.
“Who did the casts on the doors in the girls’ dormitory hallway?” another teacher asked.
“I did some of them,” Valerie said.
“You?” several people asked.
“Yes,” Valerie said slowly. “Me.”
Was she insulted?
She was too tired and too overwhelmed to be insulted.
“Do we need to do anything to repair the damage specifically caused by your casts?” someone asked.
“I don’t know,” Valerie said.
“I will detail all casts that she knew of and recommend a course of action for all of the classrooms facing the hallway,” Mr. Tannis said. For a moment, Valerie genuinely liked him.
“Who were they?” another teacher asked. “How did they get in?”
“She is very much unlikely to know that,” Lady Harrington said.
“Are you controlling your magic?” Mr. Jamison asked. Valerie shrugged.
“Some more, some less. Practicing with Mr. Tannis has been helping.”
That was actually true, in point of fact.
“Did you use dark magic?” another of Valerie’s teachers asked.
“I don’t know,” Valerie said. “Mr. Tannis can help me figure that out.”
If the man was going to volunteer, she wasn’t going to turn him down.
Lady Harrington held up a hand.
“It is very late and we have guests on campus. We are very lucky that Mr. Trent had organized for all of the students to be out of the building, but we need to be able to get the girls into their rooms as they return, and we need to conceal the damage for our visitors by morning. Everyone here who is not going to be staying for the private interview has plenty of things to occupy themselves with before they retire to bed. Thank you.”
Valerie watched as the teachers filed out, Mrs. Reynolds and Mr. Tannis both getting indications that they were dismissed, leaving just Valerie, Mr. Jamison, and Mr. Benson there with Lady Harrington.
“All right, Valerie,” Lady Harrington said. “Mr. Benson will be inspecting every inch of ground that you covered tonight, and if I find that you left anything out, I will expel you.”
“If you expel me, I will die,” Valerie answered. It wasn’t intended to be defiant - she hoped it didn’t come out defiant - but it wasn’t a plea, either.
“I will expel you from the school, but you will be permitted to reside on campus through the end of the spring semester. You have no guardians to release you into their care, so we will continue to be your custodians. But I will not have you in the dorm, nor in classes if I cannot trust you to tell me the truth after something like this happens.”
Valerie pause for a long time, considering this.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say and what I’m not,” she finally said. “There are so many secrets, and I don’t know who to trust.”
She looked at Mr. Jamison, and he gave her a sympathetic smile.
“Look at me,” Lady Harrington said. “This is about your best interests, child. I care about them more than anyone in the building, and I take the charge of your care very seriously. If I cannot protect you, then I will not continue to put you in harm’s way. I will lock you away in a protected building and wait for your mother to claim you.”
“She was here tonight,” Valerie finally said.
Lady Harrington crossed her arms.
“You say that like it’s supposed to surprise me,” the woman said. “There are eight dead men and women in my classroom hallway upstairs, and you were the only one left standing there. Did you expect me to think that you killed them?”
“No,” Valerie sulked.
“To warn me to be careful around Hanson,” Valerie said. “But that makes no sense. He’s been my best friend forever, and this is the first time she’s ever been concerned about him.”
“Who is your friend?” Lady Harrington asked.
“I grew up with him,” Valerie answered. “He’s no one.”
“He’s here by himself,” Mr. Benson said. “Not all families consider it strange for a teenage young man to travel on his own, but most of the time an older relative would have come with.”
“Who is his mother?” Lady Harrington asked.
“Her name is Martha,” Valerie said. “Martha Cox. And his dad is Victor. I don’t know his dad very well.”
“Victor Cox,” Lady Harrington said, then shook her head and looked at Mr. Benson. “Does that ring any bells for you?”
“No,” he said.
“It was weird for her to not be here,” Valerie admitted. “But he’s my best friend. You don’t understand. I trust him more than anyone. And he doesn’t even know magic exists.”
“I’ll look into it,” Mr. Benson said.
“What happened after your mother got here?” Lady Harrington asked, turning her attention back to Valerie.
“She told me to be careful with Hanson, which is just stupid, and then she said someone had come for her, and we marked the doors. She marked something in the stairwell, too, and then she broke us into Mr. Tannis’ room. I don’t know what she cast, and I don’t even know if I’ll remember what I cast. We were fighting for our lives.”
“I believe that,” Lady Harrington said. “But you will still assist Mr. Tannis in repairing what you damaged, and you will, in particular, be responsible for keeping your guest off of the second floor of the building on Saturday. We will have reconstruction finished by Sunday, but I think you have two hours’ of work to do with Mr. Tannis in the meantime.”
“It’s going to be the middle of the night before it’s done,” Valerie said. “And it wasn’t my fault.”
“I don’t care if it was your fault or not,” Lady Harrington said. “You made the mess. There is no one more capable or safer cleaning it up than you.”
“Are the men still up there?” Valerie asked quietly, trying not to show her shudder at the memory.
“I’ve had them taken care of,” Mr. Benson said. “It’s just the physical damage, at this point.”
Valerie nodded, looking at the table for a moment.
“I didn’t choose any of this,” she said. “I just want to go home and be normal.”
“You were never destined for normalcy, my dear,” Lady Harrington said with what might have been genuine compassion. “Please get yourself cleaned up and into some working clothes and meet Mr. Tannis upstairs.”
Valerie nodded, standing.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a pause. “I’m glad no one else got hurt.”
“You and your mother locked all of the girls who were still here into their rooms, including Mrs. Gold. It’s a good thing that Franky was hard enough asleep that he didn’t hear it, or else he might have ended up dead.”
Valerie nodded, then frowned.
“How does he manage the boys, if he sleeps that hard?” she asked, and Lady Harrington gave her a cool, humored smile.
“An elaborate system of alarms that he changes almost every day,” she said. “Go on, now. You aren’t the only one who’s missing sleep.” She paused, then pursed her lips. “Oh, and the next time you see her, you ask my daughter what the hell she was thinking, locking me out of my own school.”
Valerie looked at her fingers there on the table, not moving, unable to move. Finally she raised her head and Lady Harrington raised her eyebrows and nodded.
So there.
They both knew that they knew.
Valerie shook her head.
“I don’t know when that’s going to be,” she said, and Lady Harrington nodded.
“I know.”
Valerie pressed her lips, then nodded and left.
She didn’t want to go back up to the room, but her feet got her there, anyway. Mr. Jamison was there, helping Mr. Tannis get the debris there swept up - there didn’t appear to be any magic involved - and Mr. Jamison straightened as Valerie arrived.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m tired,” Valerie said. “And I just want to go to bed, but I have help clean up everything here, instead.”
“Was your mother okay?” Mr. Jamison asked, his voice lower. Valerie nodded.
“They hit her hard, there at the end, but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. I don’t really know what happened, but she ran out like nothing had happened.”
“The structural damage out here will be easy enough to deal with,” Mr. Tannis said from across the hall, cutting in. “I’d prefer you start in my classroom with picking things up and putting them away.”
“That has to be done tonight?” Valerie asked. “Can’t you just close the door so that no one sees?”
“You, as much as anyone, should recognize the risk we run if we allow those things to mingle unattended,” Mr. Tannis said. “The room will be as you found it before any of us go back to bed.”
Valerie frowned, then sighed and did as she was told.
The room was a disaster.
Even more than she’d remembered.
There were half-completed casts on every table, and only half of the wall containers were still attached, at a rough count. She wasn’t just going to have to go through everything on the floor; every box and bag and crate, she was going to have to go through it to make sure that it only had in it a single ingredient, and that all of them were packaged safely.
She worked for two and a half hours, easy, methodically going through every box one by one, cleaning up messes and asking Mr. Tannis what to do with spoiled ingredients - there was dust everywhere, and just mixing them all into a dustpan was unacceptable, even to Valerie.
As she was getting through to the front of the room and thinking about how to unwind the casts on the desks - no one had even begun to teach her that skillset - someone cleared their throat, and she turned to find Mr. Benson standing in the doorway.
“I need to show you a picture,” he said, and Valerie nodded, straightening.
Her back hurt.
“Okay.”
“I went through the yearbooks from the four years I attended here, and I found a picture. This is Martha Combs and Vick McIntire.”
Valerie’s stomach clenched, knotted itself, as she walked across the room to look at the picture.
Mr. Cox’s build was impossible to mistake, even at seventeen years old. He was the spitting image of Hanson, though Hanson Cox had his mother’s smile and her wavy hair. She put her hand over her mouth.
“They were here,” she whispered.
He nodded.
“I don’t know what he knows, what motivation his parents might have had to do whatever it was they’ve done, or even what your mother knows, but I remember that girl. She was an underclassman when I was an upperclassman, and she had big dreams.”
“Did my mother know?” Valerie asked, and Mr. Benson shrugged.
“There’s no reason to suspect that they would have crossed paths between then and now. It’s possible that they were strangers to each other before your mother decided to run away with you. I don’t know.”
“He’s been spying on me,” Valerie said. “Just like Ethan.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Mr. Benson said. “You… You aren’t the first person who comes to mind when you think about people it would be worth spying on, if you’ll forgive me saying it.”
Valerie sighed, putting her hands over her eyes.
She was so tired.
“Go to bed,” Mr. Benson said. “Lady Harrington thinks that the best therapy for shocking situations is dealing with the aftermath in a mechanical, pragmatic fashion, but I personally think that a good night’s sleep will do
wonders.”
Valerie let her arms drop.
“It’s all a disaster,” she said. “Nothing is true.”
“Everything is true,” Mr. Benson said, tipping his head to look at her. “It’s people telling you things that might not be true. But what is, has always been true.”
She frowned, and he gave her a half a smile.
“Go on. You’ll feel better in the morning. I can almost promise it.”
She nodded, going to the sink and washing her hands, then walking past Mr. Benson as he picked up a conversation with Mr. Tannis. The potions teacher had been in and out enough to ask questions on every single one of the half-casts, and about every one of them that Valerie had constructed and used. He was apparently putting together the entire fight out in the hallway the way a crime-scene investigator would have, and he was very excited.
It just made Valerie more tired.
She went downstairs, finding girls asleep on the floors under towels. Mrs. Gold’s door was in splinters, and she and Lady Harrington were standing in front of one of the dorm doors, speaking quietly.
“You can’t open them?” Valerie asked, feeling wretched.
“It’s a strong ward,” Lady Harrington said. “I expect it will vaporize with the sunrise, but I can’t be sure.”
“Then if I just let everyone in…?” Valerie asked.
“Be my guest to try,” Mrs. Gold said.
Valerie walked up to the nearest door and put her hands on it, feeling the energy there. It was one that she had drawn.
She remembered words that her mother had said, and she spoke them again, not even knowing what they meant, but the magic clicked, and she turned the knob, opening the door.
“Make sure everyone pees before they go to bed,” Valerie said, starting for the next door. “That would suck.”
“Miss Blake, I’m going to have to insist that you tell me how you did that,” Lady Harrington said.
“And I’m going to have to insist that you let me go to bed,” Valerie answered, speaking to the next door and opening it. “I don’t have the… I don’t want to deal with you tonight, and I’m making bad decisions.”
She was upset.
Earth-shaken upset.
Hanson wasn’t her best friend.
